As part of its fifth-anniversary celebration, the McConnell Arts Center is paying homage to one
of the most storied but hidden architectural gems in Worthington.

The construction of the Rush Creek Village subdivision in southeastern Worthington began in
1956. All 48 of its homes were designed following the organic principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, the
most influential U.S. architect of the 20th century.

Although organic style, marked by a mimicry of the natural space surrounding a building, is
widely accepted today, the founders of Rush Creek spent a lot of time defending the project — which
seemed a far cry from the traditional aesthetic standards of Worthington.

Newspaper clippings and text panels in the exhibit “Neighborhood in Harmony With Nature” offer a
brief history of the entertaining debate. Silver-gelatin prints by photographers Brent Turner,
Linda Turner, Sam Robbins and Tom Robbins show the standout homes in the neighborhood.

Also on display are a midcentury-modern light fixture and dining set designed by Theodore Van
Fossen, one of the Rush Creek Village founders.

Peruse, if possible, those elements of the show first. They provide a nice, if quaint,
background for what comes next: a life-size version of a Rush Creek structure.

Jeff Haase, an Ohio State University professor of interior architecture, and graduate student
Kyle Wallace designed the 7-foot-tall, 16-foot-diameter circular

structure — a scale replica of the Pepinsky guesthouse at 519 Evergreen Circle.

Although the shape of the house is true to life, the surface is covered in almost 4,000 photos
that Haase took of the interior and exterior of the original house on his iPhone.

“As I like to say,” Haase said, “we Instagrammed a house.”

Using his self-designed “spider” — a wire tripod structure that locks onto his iPhone and
creates cross hairs in the lens — he took 8-by-10-inch images of every surface in the home. He then
layered the images on top of one another to re-create pillows, bookshelves, a fireplace, curtains
and more.

One row of “concrete bricks” on the outside took 41/2 hours to put in place using wheat paste.
The result of the incredibly tedious, time-consuming process is a study in texture, light and
dimension presented in a 21st-century way through a midcentury vessel.

In his research, Haase said, he “thinks about the emotional conditions of place and how do we
communicate the representation of something using the language of something else. . . . How do you
write a book about a place without using words?”

The interior of the photographed home is at once chaotic but peaceful, technological but
ethereal.

By playing with one’s idea of what external, man-made pieces constitute a built environment and
why, Haase has successfully presented a modern interpretation of an existing environment — much
like the designs of Wright’s organic architecture.